The Golden Notebook cover art

The Golden Notebook

Preview
Get this deal Try Premium Plus free
Offer ends 29 January 2026 at 11:59PM GMT.
Prime members: New to Audible? Get 2 free audiobooks during trial.
Just £0.99/mo for your first 3 months of Audible.
1 bestseller or new release per month—yours to keep.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, podcasts, and Originals.
Auto-renews at £8.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection - including bestsellers and new releases.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, celeb exclusives, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically.

The Golden Notebook

By: Doris Lessing
Narrated by: Juliet Stevenson
Get this deal Try Premium Plus free

£8.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly. Offer ends 29 January 2026 at 11:59PM GMT.

£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

Buy Now for £41.99

Buy Now for £41.99

LIMITED TIME OFFER | £0.99/mo for the first 3 months

Premium Plus auto-renews at £8.99/mo after 3 months. Terms apply.

About this listen

One of the most important books of the growing feminist movement of the 1950s, The Golden Notebook was brought to the attention of a wider public by the Nobel Prize award to Doris Lessing in 2007.

Author Anna Wulf attempts to overcome writer’s block by writing a comprehensive "golden notebook" that draws together the preoccupations of her life, each of which is examined in a different notebook: sources of her creative inspiration in a black book, communism in a red book, the breakdown of her marriage in a yellow book, and day-to-day emotions and dreams in a blue book. Anna’s struggle to unify the various strands of her life – emotional, political, and professional – amasses into a fascinating encyclopaedia of female experience in the ‘50s.

In this authentic, taboo-breaking novel, Lessing brings the plight of women’s lives from obscurity behind closed doors into broad daylight. The Golden Notebook resonates with the concerns and experiences of a great many women and is a true modern classic, thoroughly deserving of its reputation as a feminist bible. A notoriously long and complex work, it is given a new life by this – its first unabridged recording.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying reference material will be available in your My Library section along with the audio.

©1962 Doris Lessing (P)2010 Naxos Audiobook
Classics Emotions Thought-Provoking Fiction

Listeners also enjoyed...

The Bleeding Heart cover art
Doris Lessing cover art
The Years cover art
Middlemarch cover art
The Golden Bowl cover art
The Odd Women cover art
Crow cover art
Emma [Naxos Edition] cover art
The Red and the Black cover art
Brave New World cover art
My Brilliant Friend cover art
The Waves cover art
Doris Lessing cover art
A Time to Dance cover art
The Power of One cover art
The Sound and the Fury cover art

Critic reviews

" The Golden Notebook is Doris Lessing’s most important work and has left its mark upon the ideas and feelings of a whole generation of women." (Elizabeth Hardwick, New York Times Book Review)
All stars
Most relevant
delightful at times, painful most of the time. well worth a listen, but I was glad when I finally heard audible's hope..
Juliet Stevenson helps with soldiering through it all.

it's all very odd, isn't?

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

Still as fresh and thought provoking as it ever was. Ravishing performances from Juliet Stevenson
I urge every adult human being, especially those of us who write fiction, to immerse yourself in this really quite disturbing experience.
I'm not the same person I was when I first downloaded the book and began listening- the mark of great fiction

Superb and challenging classic novel

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

Dont try this as a bedtime read unless you’re desperate to fall asleep almost immediately !

Difficult !

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

Well this is a book about navel gazing. Not my thing. But beautifully written and performed.
The level of introspection was profound to a point of mental health concerns and beyond.

Very very long

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

A refreshingly candid examination of the mismatch of the sexes. Brutal at times, longing, searching and often bleak. Brilliantly observed and deafeningly hopeless. I'm left wondering if things have changed or whether they are just better masked.

An examination of the sexual politics of her time.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

See more reviews